


Trouble Shared

by paperowls



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But just be aware, Canon-Typical Amounts of Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, I don't think this is any worse than what it does, Mystery, POV Multiple, Something is Up with Edward Elric, i guess?, this show and manga can get pretty dark at times
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28115430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperowls/pseuds/paperowls
Summary: ”Just give him back! He’s my little brother, he’s all I’ve got left!”The bloodied knife fell to the floor with a clatter, and Edward clapped.---When faced with the worst night of his life and the prospect of losing his brother for good, Ed makes a different, but just as drastic, choice. It has its pros, and its cons, but if anything it definitely makes things more interesting for the people around him.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	Trouble Shared

**Author's Note:**

> ...is trouble halved.  
> One would hope so at least. Otherwise you've just made someone else's life worse for no reason.
> 
> For all the fanfic that I've written this is the first one I've ever actually posted so, uh, enjoy? I suppose? I'm terrified, is what I'm trying to say.

”Just give him back! He’s my little brother, he’s all I’ve got left!”

The bloodied knife fell to the floor with a clatter, and Edward clapped.  
\---  
Roy Mustang had come to Resembool expecting an adult alchemist, filled with potential and ready for a job interview. He was not, could never have been, prepared for what he would find in that basement.

The thick smear of crusted brown they had followed from the moment they saw it, half washed away by the rain, on the porch. The cheery small family home, pictures of a mother and two golden-haired boys, a bookshelf with half its contents strewn on the floor, half a loaf of bread placed with the cut side down as to keep it from going stale, all drawn through with a line of gore that made every room they passed though smell sour and metallic. They had thought it was a murder scene. But then they had followed the smear down the stairs, kept going even as they noticed how clumps of something that had stuck to the edge of every step. The stone floor was coated and sticky with drying fluids. The room was dark and the air raw and smelled of ozone. Then there was the transmutation circle. One that Roy recognized even as he had never seen it before and didn’t understand half of it. Later they found the patch of disturbed earth out back of the house, with a marker stuck in it. Maybe Riza still thought this was a murder scene. She had some theoretical knowledge of alchemy, but should know nothing about this. No one should know about this.

Even then, Roy wasn’t prepared to meet the perpetrator of this crime against nature. In that cottage down the road, wrapped in bandages and missing two limbs, sat a preteen boy with eyes like the dead.

“We went to your house, we saw the floor, what was that?” Roy dragged this living corpse up by the shirt. “What did you do?”

“We’re sorry…” the boy murmured. “We didn’t mean it… We’re sorry… We’re sorry…”

This boy had done the most terrible thing an alchemist could do, the most forbidden, the most taboo. And yet, when he heard of why, Roy couldn’t find it in himself to feel anything but pity. Well. Maybe something else. And oh how he hated himself for feeling that something else.

Because Roy had come here with a mission, and even though the alchemist he had been looking for turned out to be no more than a boy, already wracked with trauma, he was just as brilliant as Roy had been promised. He had come out the other side of an attempted human transmutation. At just eleven years old, Edward Elric had put together that circle and it had been powerful enough to tear the boy apart. He had potential, damn it. He could be useful. Roy tasted bile at the back of his throat, but he was going ahead with the job interview.

“You could even find a way to get your limbs back,” that had to be something this boy wanted, and Roy was apparently not above tempting a traumatized child. And he was right. It was temping him. The longing sat deep behind Edward’s eyes, so faint Roy almost couldn’t see it, but it was there. The boy hesitated for a moment, deliberating, then he looked up.

“And what about Al?” he asked.

“Who?” Roy had no memory of hearing of an ‘Al’ before.

“My brother. He…” Edward’s hand clenched above his heart. “He wasn’t as lucky as me.”

Roy thought back to a pile of children’s clothes spread out on a blood-soaked floor and thought he was going to be sick.

“Your brother is gone, Edward,” he tried his level best to keep his voice calm and authoritative. “Nothing you can do will be able to bring him back.” You of all people should know that, he didn’t say.

But the words didn’t hit home like he expected. Instead, the hand on Edward’s chest balled into a fist, and when he looked at Roy there was something fierce in his eyes. Then the boy furrowed his brows and went quiet. There seemed to be something of a struggle in him, several times his eyes flicked up towards Roy’s face, and he looked like he was about to say something, only to bite down on his lip once again. Roy waited patiently for the boy to make up his mind and tell him, but when he finally did, the boy’s gaze was calm and sad and entirely closed off.

“Don’t worry, Lieutenant Colonel, I’m sure we’ll figure something out,” Edward looked down into the table.

That didn’t make Roy feel any better at all. “No. No bringing people back, damn it! If they’re gone they need to stay gone. All you’re going to do is lose yourself as well.”

Maybe he had read the boy wrong. Maybe that was the whole point. But Edward’s eyes were more alive than they had been when Roy had first seen him. It was just a hunch, but hethought perhaps all this boy needed was a direction and he would set off sprinting. And if Roy could aim him, it felt like maybe he would rather set off towards bettering his own life and not towards self-destruction.

“No. Never again,” Edward’s voice was quiet. “We’ve… learnt that lesson.”

“Good,” and Roy didn’t know if he really believed him, but there was relief in his voice anyway. “Come see me in East when you’re ready.”

The conversation sat with him, even as he and Riza said their goodbyes and made it onto the train. There was something there, something in the words spoken or unspoken, that Roy couldn’t let go of. Some secret the boy had kept from him, had felt it necessary to keep from him, even though Roy knew the most damning thing someone could know about another alchemist. He dragged a hand though his hair and looked out at the blooming countryside. There was something he needed to know and he was missing it.

“It seems cruel,” Riza said from her seat opposite him. She always had a way of saying what Roy didn’t want to be thinking. “What you were doing to that boy. Do you really think he should join the military?”

“I think…” and Roy was choosing his words carefully. Needed his subordinate to understand that it wasn’t all about his own selfish motivations. “That he needs a mission. If he doesn’t get one, he’s going to stay in that little house and rot from the inside, or go haring off on some half-baked plan and get himself killed. At least as a State Alchemist he will have a real shot at bettering his situation.”

“You got all that off him from one conversation?”

“He and his brother tried to bring their dead mother back to life. Actually attempted it,” Roy had never seen a full human transmutation circle before. After all the horror stories he had heard about what happens to the people who attempt it, and he had heard many, his teacher had made sure of that, he had never seen it done first hand before. It was the second lesson ever drilled into the head of all alchemists, only preceded by the Law of Equivalent Exchange. Human transmutation cannot be done. You cannot bring someone dead back to life. All attempting it will do is ruin you. “Everyone who knows a bit of alchemy and has lost someone have thought of it. Of course we have, we have the power of the universe at our fingertips. I mean, we’re so used to be able to bend reality to our will, why should we not be able to bring the dead back? It should be possible, it feels like it’s possible, and it hurts so much to have them gone the idea that you shouldn’t even attempt it feels ridiculous. You feel like you’re insulting the dead by not trying. Like you don’t love them enough, refusing to take a risk, if there was a chance you could could bring them back,” Roy had never come close to what the Elrics had done, but he was a soldier, he had been in a war. Of course there had been moments when the thought had crossed his mind. “But the stories of people who have actually done it are vanishingly few. Do you know why?”

“Why?” Riza’s voice was quiet. She probably already knew a good amount of what Roy had said. She may not be an alchemist herself, but she had lived close to one all her life. Roy wanted to tell her anyway. Explain his thought process. Make her really understand what they had seen, and why Edward Elric was so dangerous, both to himself and to others.

“There are a couple of reasons. First: Every student of alchemy is told in no uncertain terms exactly how horrific and gruesome human transmutation is. What it does to the thing you bring back. What it does to you. We’ve seen the results of it first hand, so you can imagine what the stories are like. Fear is usually enough to keep people in line.

“If that fails then the person attempting it will usually be stopped by the sheer difficulty of the task. It is no small matter to try to reassemble a human being. Nature takes nine months and the participation of two different people and even then what you get is not a specific person the way a human transmutation is attempting to call a dead loved one back.

“And even then, even if you have everything assembled and all the calculations done; even after having struggled through what may have been months or years of intellectually difficult and emotionally scarring work; even after having turned refused to give up or get cold feet; standing at the edge of your circle, the sheer amount of alchemical power you would need at your disposal to be able activate it must be immense. The raw skill required to direct and focus the reaction to accomplish even a failed human transmutation is staggering.

“And Edward Elric managed all that at just eleven years old. Of course, he may have trained under a teacher who never told him not to do it, but the moment he and his brother started looking into performing the transmutation they must have heard every story I have of the horrors that follow it. More than me, probably, since I’ve never sook the knowledge out. Do you know what that tells me about them?”

Riza was pale. “What?”

“That Edward Elric is reckless enough to throw caution to the wind to get what he wants, smart enough to find it, determined enough to keep at it, and powerful enough to almost see it though. If we leave him to his devices he is going to do something like this again, and we don’t know what the fallout of that will be.”

“And you want to give this brilliant, reckless, and dangerous boy to the wolves running this country?” Riza sounded even more dubious than before.

“He need us. Needs our research materials and the authority of the silver pocket watch to make the investigations he is going to want to make. And I need him to be on my staff when he decides to join. You’re right, I cannot let the higher ups have him. So I am going to claim him first. He is either going to join the military, die a slow death in that little house, kill himself and quite possibly others on some foolhardy adventure, or he’s going to almost kill himself and be snapped up by the military anyway. I’m making the best of a bad situation.”

“Are you sure about this?” Riza asked, quietly.

“I have to be. I’ve made my play, now all I can do is see it through.”

“I still think it was cruel.”

So do I, Roy thought, but said nothing. Instead he looked out the window over the rolling hills that surrounded Resembool. It really was a beautiful countryside.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this far! With a little luck this is going to turn into something of a series, but I've never been good at follow-through, so we'll see how that goes. A little encouragement might to a long way towards motivating me, though! But seriously, even the idea someone read this is super gratifying, so thank you for that. Have an excellent time of day.


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